


Condemn or Crown

by tempus_teapot (dreadnot)



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:47:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadnot/pseuds/tempus_teapot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Anders' death, it is Vengeance who tracks down Sebastian to balance the scales. Written for a kmeme prompt "Breaking Sebastian"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Condemn or Crown

**Author's Note:**

> All non-con and most torture in this fic is screened by a fade to black between scenes, but is framed very clearly to allow the reader to picture it. Please be forewarned.

_To take revenge halfheartedly is to court disaster: Either condemn or crown your hatred._ –Pierre Corneille

The apostate mage, Anders, lay dead at his lover’s hand.

Bethany Hawke lay dead at her brother’s hand.

First Enchanter Orsino had been struck down by the Champion fighting alongside the Knight-Commander.

In a kind of twisted justice, Knight-Commander Meredith, now transfigured in her hubris, knelt like something formed from cooled lava and tainted lyrium in the Gallows courtyard. Killed by the Champion and his allies.

The Circle was well and truly broken. The Chantry and its leadership in Kirkwall decapitated.

People would say that Kirkwall would never be the same, and in some ways that was true. In a city where the Veil was already thin, the wild magic, violence, and mass deaths had torn it like spider web in a gale. Demons would slip through the rents in reality in ever greater numbers, drawn to the beacon of Kirkwall from the darkest parts of the Fade.

The kinder spirits would abandon the city altogether, fearing the city’s taint, fearing losing themselves to the evil the city leaked into both sides of the Veil.

For some spirits, bound to the city on the physical plane, retreat was not an option, and the taint found them, took them, _turned_ them.

•••

The spirit known as Justice knew its way around a corpse. It had animated Kristoff’s body well after his death. Anders’ death had wounded him, but not destroyed him. It took time to regroup, but the thinning of the veil and the energies released across the city fed his spirit, fed it on blood and pain, on terror and rage, and nurtured him on the memory that Hawke would have spared him, would have spared Anders, were it not for the words of one man.

_No! You cannot let this abomination go free. He dies, or I am returning to Starkhaven. And I will bring such an army with me on my return that there will be nothing left of Kirkwall for these maleficarum to rule!_

The burn of the dagger after Anders’ brief flare of hope remained – might always remain – branded into the spirit that had been Justice as indelibly as the brand of the Tranquil on a mage’s forehead.

Succored on pain, nurtured on wrath, the spirit that had been Justice seeped back into Anders’ body through the link that remained even when his death had thrust both spirits out through the Veil. When Anders let go, it was with a sense of relief and sorrow so powerful that it had laid Justice bare, had flayed its spirit raw.

What rushed to fill those wounds was no gentle emotion. Not in the City of Chains.

What permeated Anders’ lifeless body was something transfigured, barely recognizable as Justice.

What stood up, swaying on Anders’ feet was no longer Justice.

When the blond figure unsteadily swayed on its feet and contorted to pull the knife from its back, blue fire oozed from the gash and kept oozing, a spirit’s eternal scar. It looked around and found Anders’ staff on the ground near the pool of blood that had leaked from its host body when he died. It stooped to retrieve the staff and leaned heavily on it as it left the site of Anders’ death behind.

Vengeance had come to Kirkwall.

•••

The days after the first battles in the Gallows were not peaceful. People tried to regroup, to recover, but unlike the battles with the Qunari four years before, once the Champion won, it was only the beginning, not the end. Mages mad with terror had turned to blood magic. Demons had broken through the Veil even without the intervention on the living side. Streets ran with blood day and night, and even homes were not refuges as nightmare creatures appeared out of thin air to destroy entire families to feed the sigils that were built into the city’s very streets.

Stories began to emerge from the cacophony of terror. Stories of a mage that killed demons, templars, mages, and citizens alike. A mage with eyes like lightning and a voice like Judgment.

He never slept, they said. He bled blue fire from a wound that never closed in his back, they whispered. He sought one man, the story went. Sebastian. Sebastian Vael. _**Where is Sebastian Vael?**_

Then the mage was gone, but what was one less terror in a city plagued by an army of nightmares?

•••

Starkhaven simmered with anxiety. The walls bristled with archers watching the men and women who entered the city, watching for signs of trouble. The nobility was still in turmoil after the return of Sebastian Vael from the anathema city of Kirkwall. They remembered him as weak-minded, more interested in his pleasure than his place in the ruling family.

The man who had returned from Kirkwall was not that Sebastian Vael. He was stern-faced, determined, and ruthless. Goran Vael, never a man known for his backbone, stepped aside rather than face his cousin headlong. Sebastian had him thrown in the castle dungeon.

Prince Sebastian showed a face that no one could ever have expected from the dissolute rake he had once been. He organized the city guard and the principality’s standing army and militia. He met with the templars and Starkhaven Circle’s First Enchanter. Perhaps he meant to fend off the rebellion that had broken Kirkwall’s Circle, but it was too late.

•••

“Shh…” Barnabas leaned back to shuffle the pile of hay in the back of his cart. The hay helped cushion the baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables that he was bringing into the city from his farm. “Not a peep from you now or we’re done for.”

There was no response from the back of the cart.

The farmer smiled tightly at the guards at the gate when his turn to pass into the city came. They knew him; he came every market day with his wares and every market day, just like today, he reached back and picked two perfect pieces of fruit – apples today – off the top of one of the baskets and tossed them to the guards.

“For your good work,” he said and nodded when they thanked him and waved him through with barely a cursory peek at the back of the cart and promises that wives or sisters would be coming to see him later.

He slumped and dropped his smile when he was through the gates, letting out a sigh to release his tension. Once out of sight of the gates and blocked from sight from the walls by a two-story building, he slowed his horse to a stroll and reached back to move one of the baskets.

“This is where we part ways,” he said to the man who sat up, shaking hay out of his hair before he pulled the hood up on his cloak to cover his blonde hair and gray pallor. “Just you remember, if you see Gretchen in the Circle, tell her I did this for her. Tell her that her father remembers her.”

“I do not forget,” Vengeance said, jumping down from the cart and accepting his staff and backpack from the man. “I never forget.”

Barnabas’ arms prickled at the man’s tone. He shook out the reins and rode away to market without a look back.

Vengeance took stock of the street where he stood, glancing back toward the city walls before turning his attention up toward Starkhaven Castle. Situated on a hill over the city, its high gray walls would block the sun for those living closest to them. To live always in Sebastian Vael’s shadow… The thought stirred Vengeance into motion toward the castle, and toward the tower that rose at its flank.

•••

The King’s Foot tavern lay between the castle and the Circle Tower, marked by a sign cut from a plank of oak – a large bare foot wearing a crown at a jaunty angle on its legless ankle. Its patrons were drawn from castle and Circle staff. They came to blow off some steam after a day working under the steel grip of tensions in the Circle tower as news from outside trickled to them that a mage revolution had started, or in the castle where no one knew what wrong step might set the new prince off on another program of rooting out the enemies Flora Hariman had warned him of.

The laughter in the tavern was sharp, crackling with tension and humor turned hard in a situation that held no humor. Vengeance leaned hard on his staff as he entered, sweeping the large room with a glance. His face was set in grim lines that gave nothing back when curious patrons stared at the hooded man.

His eyes passed over a familiar face, the dwarven woman’s expression turning grim when she recognized him in turn. She excused herself from her companions, jerked a head toward a door at the back of the room, and disappeared through it.

He followed her into a long corridor that led away from the front of the building lined with closed doors. He saw a door swinging closed halfway down the corridor on the left and strode to catch it before it could finish closing.

Lenore was lighting a lantern as he closed the door and stood with it against his back.

“I’m not going to run, you know. You don’t have to stand there like some kind of bloody templar watching a naughty apostate,” she said acerbically. “Even if you’re supposed to be dead. That’s all the news.” Her voice turned nasal, mocking the classic tones of gossip. “Oh, did you hear about the apostate, Anders? Blew up the Chantry in Kirkwall, started a war he did. He let his lover, the _Champion of Kirkwall,_ put a knife in his back. Oh, what a tragic tale of broken love.”

Lenore was short, thick, and perpetually scowling. Everything a dwarf should be if you didn’t count her glossy mane of red hair and long-fingered hands so perfectly suited for the delicate weaving she was known for. Her cloth went into making the finest mage robes. She put her hands on her hips and turned that scowl up on Vengeance. “What are you doing here, Anders? Starkhaven’s no place for you right now. Nowhere in Thedas is the right place for you. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you look like nug shit.”

She looked him up and down. “I take that back. You look like nug shit after another nug ate the shit and shit it out again.”

Vengeance didn’t dignify the railing or the insult with comment. “I need your connections,” he said. “I need to get into the castle and I need a book from the Circle library.”

“Anything else I can get for you while we’re at it?” Lenore asked, shifting to fold her arms across her chest. “Maybe a vat of lyrium, three dragon eggs, and the First Enchanter’s staff? I should have all those things by breakfast.”

“No, just a way into the castle and the book,” Vengeance said. His focus left no room for banter, no room for even pretending to acknowledge sarcasm. He had lived in Anders long enough to recognize it, but it was a useless waste of time.

“Why should I help you?”

Vengeance set his backpack on the floor and pulled from its depths a pouch. He shook it for her and watched her cock her head.

“Stone,” she breathed. “I hear gold in there. Not a single copper in that pouch I wager.” Her eyes lit with avarice and calculation before she shook her head.

“I can’t do it. I know you helped me out when you were a warden, but you aren’t a warden anymore and all of Thedas will be down your throat as soon as they know you aren’t dead. I’m sorry, but I have family to think of.”

Vengeance’s eyes narrowed. He raised a hand that suddenly caught fire, casting an eerie blue light. His voice reverberated with the spirit’s barely contained rage. “You will help me. If not for money then because if you do not, I will kill you. I will kill you and then I will find your son and I will kill him, and then I will go to Orzammar and I will find your mother and your father, your aunts and your uncles, your nieces and your nephews, and I will kill them all. I will kill them and I will ensure that they all know that they die because you denied me.”

She took a step away from the look of inhuman intensity on Vengeance’s face, her scowl lost, replaced by creeping fear. He took a step forward, she took another step back. He backed her against the wall and held the blazing hand up to her face. “I need that book and a way into the castle.”

•••

Teppic had one end of Vengeance’s staff propped on his shoulder, Vengeance hefted the other end against his shoulder. Between them, legs tied to the staff, hung a freshly slaughtered goat. They carried it past the guards and into the castle kitchens.

Vengeance helped heave the goat up onto a cutting block and pulled the staff free of the goat’s legs. Teppic pointed to two doors near the blazing fireplace. “Left is down, right is up,” he said into Vengeance’s ear, wrinkling his nose at the faint smell of decay that clung to the man. “That’s it. I’ve done all I can. If you get caught, you don’t know me.”

Vengeance pressed a pouch into the man’s hand and threaded his way among the hustle and bustle of the kitchen staff and disappeared through the right-hand door.

•••

Sebastian did not return to his rooms until after the moon had set and even the most ambitious of courtiers had retired to conduct their intrigues and assignations behind closed doors. He had been delayed by the necessity of punishing the guards at the door to his private chambers, who had fallen asleep on duty.

After rousing the men and calling their captain to see how two of his supposed finest had failed in their duty to their prince, he had sent the men off to be lashed for their dereliction of duty and seen two fresh soldiers installed at the door.

The returned prince of Starkhaven had aged in the short time since he had left the Champion in Kirkwall. There were hollows under his eyes, lines around his eyes and mouth, and his expression even at rest was grim.

He was silent while servants scurried in to remove his gleaming white armor. Silent while a diffident young woman brought him a plate of bread and cheese and poured a bottle of wine. Silent when his chambers finally emptied and left the prince to his thoughts.

In the silence of his chambers, Vengeance’s voice when it rose in his spell was loud. For a moment Sebastian froze in shock to see the blond-haired mage suddenly in his chambers, appearing like one of those Tevinter magisters out of nowhere.

Sebastian ran for the door to snatch it open and call for his guards, reaching it just as Vengeance finished his spell. The doors and windows lit with crackling energy that threw him back with a grunt of pain and surprise.

Vengeance thrust an open palm out at Sebastian, hitting him with a fist of energy to slam the man flat to the ground and hold him in place, pressing the air out of him until his sight dazzled with red spots and a creeping blackness. The spell held him while Vengeance walked over to bring his boot down on Sebastian’s right hand, baring his teeth in a demon’s grin when the bones crunched under his heel.

“Use your bow now,” Vengeance coldly invited.

He crouched by Sebastian’s head to see the expression on the man’s face. It was the next best thing to hearing him scream, since the spell had crushed all breath for noise out of him. When his face slackened and his eyes fluttered closed, Vengeance released the spell and took the pack off his back to remove the sets of manacles he had brought along.

He worked quickly, methodically, sweeping everything off the surface of Sebastian’s desk before laying him across its surface, chaining his wrists and ankles to its heavy oak legs. It left him with his arms stretched uncomfortably wide, straining at the shoulders, and his legs splayed wide open.

Sebastian’s eyes started to flutter, jaw clamping in surprise when Vengeance shoved a wad of cloth between his teeth and tied a gag over that.

Then he crouched in front of Sebastian again, inches away from the man’s face when he reached out and twisted one of his broken fingers, drinking in the muffled cry of pain behind the gag and the way his face contorted in pain.

“You should have let her let Anders live,” he told Sebastian. “She would have watched him. She would have watched me. And we wouldn’t be here now.”

He held up a skinning knife in front of Sebastian’s eyes and brought it close enough that if Sebastian blinked he would cut his eyelid on its tip. Vengeance watched him until his eyelids started to quiver with the effort of not blinking, drinking in every drop of fear in Sebastian’s expression before he abruptly stood.

He cut away Sebastian’s finery, jerking away the pieces of cloth hard enough to shake the man’s body on the desk, pulling painfully at his shoulders with each hard tug. He left small, “careless” cuts on his arms and back, hips and buttocks where the knife pressed too hard through the cloth, but really, they were minor things.

Vengeance had learned about the sweetness of human fear in Kirkwall when it had fed him, nursed him, and aided his reclamation of Anders’ body. He wanted Sebastian to drown in it before he lost everything he had to lose.

He came back to Sebastian’s head and set the backpack where Sebastian could see it if he looked. He removed a carved phallus and held it up for the man’s examination. It was larger than Anders had been even at his most aroused and harder than any man could ever be.

He drank in the look of fear on Sebastian’s face, letting it feed him, letting it stoke the fires of hatred that the man’s words at the Gallows had ignited. Anders had been resigned to his fate, but Vengeance? Vengeance did not know resignation. Vengeance would _never_ know resignation.

He remembered that Sebastian believed so earnestly in his vows. That he had left behind his rake’s days to be a chaste brother. Even now the man wore the white armor with Andraste’s face at his belt. He remembered Anders’ thoughts on that buckle and on Sebastian’s foolishness.

He remembered the human terror and abhorrence of rape.

The phallus would have to stand in for what Anders’ body could no longer achieve.

•••

Sebastian’s room seemed darker inside that out despite the lanterns and candles, despite the barrier that still hung at the doors and windows. Hours of cruelty brought their own pall.

“You want me to stop,” Vengeance said, not for the first time since he had begun. He set the phallus down where Sebastian could see it. See its smooth pale wood stained with blood and shit. See it and remember that it would never get tired, never spend itself, never go limp. Its wielder would never sleep.

Sebastian struggled to breathe past the snot clogging his nose, his mouth straining at its corners to open enough to draw more breath past the gag. He had come close to dying several times during the night, to slipping away to suffocation and escaping Vengeance’s grasp, but each time the demon had drawn him back, loosened the gag, used healing magic, doused his head with water and he was back, back in a world of pain and helplessness, of hopelessness.

“You know what I want.”

Sebastian shook his head.

Vengeance picked up the phallus.

•••

Dawn hinted at its approach when Vengeance again crouched by Sebastian’s head, leaning in to lick the tears off the man’s cheeks. Outside this torture chamber were the first sleepy twitters of birds in the castle garden, the blackness of night lightening by the minute to turn to a gray veil waiting to lift.

“You want me to stop.”

Sebastian’s head hung limply. He was beyond pain. Beyond hope. Beyond even caring what this horror wanted. He wanted it to end. Just to end.

He nodded.

Vengeance removed the gag, unbound his wrists and ankles, leaving him still lying face down on the desk, too weak to move. He knelt on the floor in front of Sebastian, placing a stoppered vial by his knee before he looked up into Sebastian’s eyes.

“I want in.”

Slow tears trickled down Sebastian’s cheeks as he nodded.

Vengeance took Sebastian’s face in his hands and kissed him. Sebastian didn’t respond until his body suddenly jerked on the desk, legs kicking out, hands flailing for purchase. The air crackled with power before the barriers at the door winked out of existence. Sebastian’s body went limp, motionless. Even the birds outside went silent as though holding their collective breaths for something momentous.

Sebastian drew in a first wheezing breath then another. He gasped and choked before putting his un-broken hand down to shove himself forward off the desk, landing on Anders’ body, which crumpled under him.

He fumbled for the vial with his left hand and flicked the cork off with his thumb before downing its contents. The healing potion began its work immediately, closing cuts, knitting together the broken bones in his hand, repairing the damage Vengeance had done with his chosen weapon.

All except one wound on his back that oozed blue fire.

Vengeance let the body heal before he stood up and stretched. He could feel Sebastian’s horror somewhere deep behind his eyes and smiled.

_It will never be enough, but it’s a start._


End file.
